September 8, 2016

My Best Ideas Come to Me in the Bathroom: a guest post by John F.D. Taff, author/co-editor of "I Can Taste the Blood"

Five
Unique Voices. Five Disturbing Visions. One Nightmare.

From
Bram Stoker Award-nominated authors Josh Malerman, the newly minted
master of modern horror, and John F.D. Taff, the “King of Pain,”
to the mind-bending surrealism of Erik T. Johnson, the darkly poetic
prose of J. Daniel Stone and the transgressive mania of Joe Schwartz,
I CAN TASTE THE BLOOD offers up five novellas from five unique
authors whose work consistently expands the boundaries of
conventional fiction.

I
CAN TASTE THE BLOOD opens the doors to a movie theater of the damned;
travels the dusty, sin-drenched desert with an almost Biblical
mysterious stranger; recounts the phantasmagoric story of birth,
death and rebirth; contracts a hit that’s not at all what it seems;
and exposes the disturbing possibilities of what might be killing
Smalltown, U.S.A.

As
diverse as they are, in voice and vision, the work of the five
celebrated authors assembled in this stunning volume of terror share
one common theme, one hideous and terrifying nightmare that can only
be contained within the pages of I CAN TASTE THE BLOOD.

The
book has an introduction by John F. D. Taff about the impetus of the
book and an afterword featuring comments by each author.

As
an author, one piece of useful advice I can give authors practically
in any field is that ideas come from everywhere. Literally.
Everywhere. Every aspect of your life, every person you meet, every
conversation you overhear, every place you visit, every odor you
smell, sound you hear, injury you absorb or inflect, physical or
otherwise, everything is fodder for your writing.

Simply
put, if you're an author and you're not strip-mining your life,
you're not taking full advantage of the arsenal that is right at
hand.

Take,
for instance, I Can Taste the Blood. It's a collection of
five novellas from five wildly disparate authors—Stoker-Nominated
and Bestselling author Josh Malerman, J. Daniel Stone, Joe Schwartz,
Erik T. Johnson and Stoker-Nominated Author John F. Taff. I kind of
shepherded this project, coming up with the original idea, then
hand-selecting the writers I wanted to participate in this strange
endeavor.

But
where did the idea come from, you might ask? (And please do,
otherwise I'm writing this guest blog for absolutely no reason.)

A
bathroom. The idea came to me in a bathroom.

Specifically
the run-down bathroom in a dive bar in south city St. Louis.

Let
me explain.

Black
Thorn Pub & Pizza is a place my wife, Deb, and I used to go to
regularly when we still lived in St. Louis, before our picking-up
stakes and traipsing to southern Illinois. But that's a whole
'nother story, as they say.

Anyway,
Black Thorn is kind of known in the area for its pizza, which is an
approximation of deep-dish Chicago-style pie. It's delicious,
certainly not nutritious, and goes great with a couple of beers or
hard ciders, which, incidentally, my wife and I partook of that very
evening.

Being
a man of a certain age, after the first beer or two, I had
to…well…make room for more beers. So, I excused myself and
teetered over to the men's room. Now, this men's room was probably
not too different from many a men's room at many a dive
bar—oppressive odors, dank surroundings, sticky floors, etc.

As
I stood at the urinal, I faced the cheap press-board walls of the
stall, which were absolutely covered in graffiti. Ya know, the usual
stuff, vulgarly lilting couplets, accusations of the basest sort
directed at specific people—ex-wives, cheating girlfriends,
etc.—and physiologically questionable sexual practices. But there,
a gem among the almost literal turds, was this:

I
Can Taste the Blood.

Wicked,
weird, thought-provoking. Scrawled in a huge, loopy handwriting in
marker right at eye level. Who penned this freaky epithet? For what
reason? And why right there and then? And you carry a marker into a
dive bar restroom? Really?

All
of this and more went through my mind as I zipped up. I made my way
back to the table and told my wife about the phrase, offered to even
show her. She politely declined.

But
the more I rolled that phrase around in my mind, the more I knew I
had to do something with it. I brought it to one of my closest
writerly friends, Joe Schwartz, and he wanted to use that phrase in
something of his, too. It didn't take much longer for both of us to
realize that this idea, I Can Taste the Blood, was bigger than
the two of us. We needed to find some more talented, unusual voices
to share in this vision we'd concocted.

We
roped in Dan, Erik and Josh to form a quintet of authors, each voice
patently different from the next. And this collection of disparate
voices, this anthology of completely unrelated—yet
related!—stories, somehow seems to work. Counter-intuitively,
perhaps, but lord, it turned out pretty darned good.

So, let this be a lesson to all of you out there cutting the lawn or
driving to the store to get milk or having dinner with your
mother-in-law. All of it.

Anything.

Anywhere.

What
you're really doing, ultimately, is creating ideas for new things to
write.

Now,
go and taste the blood.

Author
Biographies

Josh
Malerman

–

Josh
Malerman is the author of Bird
Box and Ghastle
and Yule and some forty other
novels and stories that he wishes he could release all in one day...
and he just might do that! He lives in Michigan with his fiancee
Allison Laakko and their two cats Dewey and Frankie. Used to be three
cats, but Dandy died on Halloween, begging the question: will the
color orange always make Josh sad? Or will he see Dandy amongst the
pumpkins, deliriously, happily, for the rest of his days...

J.
Daniel Stone

–

J.
Daniel Stone is the pseudonym for a hotheaded Italian kid from New
York City. He has been a menace to society since 1987 and continues
to terrorize local bookstores, art galleries and dive bars.

When
he is not causing mischief, Stone reads, writes and attends as many
rock shows as possible. He is the intermittently proud father of two
bastard children: The Absence of Light (2013) and Blood Kiss (2016).
Somewhere, out there in the dark, one can find more of his
illegitimate spawns telling imaginative stories. Find him on Twitter
@SolitarySpiral.

Joe
Schwartz

–

In
2008, Joe’s Black T-Shirt:
Short Stories About St. Louis
was published as a personal favor for friends of Joe Schwartz. The
idea that people outside of Schwartz’s limited Midwestern world
could find these dark, and occasionally personal, stories
entertaining was as exciting as it was mysterious for the first-time
author. Since then, he has written two more collections of short
stories as well as the novels A
Season Without Rain and Adam
Wolf and The Cook Brothers - A Tale of Sex, Drugs and Rock&Roll.
The kind of stories he tells have been described as “a sharp punch
to the gut” and disarming “like a sunny day in Hell.”

Erik
T. Johnson

–

Erik
T. Johnson doesn’t believe in order or boxes. He became a writer
because he can’t make a straight line to save his life—since
stories consist of terrifically asymmetrical, random sequences of
random shapes. Also because of what Georges Bataille meant by: “I
write the way a child cries: a child slowly relinquishes the reasons
he has for being in tears.”

Johnson
is a Written Backwards DARWA Voice Award-winner whose fiction appears
in renowned places, such as Space & Time Magazine, Tales of the
Unanticipated, Qualia Nous, and all three volumes of the
award-winning Chiral Mad series.

Erik
is certain unreliable narrators don’t exist—only unreliable
authors. He will prove his uncompromising reliability when his first
book of short stories is published in 2016.

Visit
Erik at www.eriktjohnson.net.

Stalk
him on Twitter @YES_TRESPASSING.

Curse
him at your own risk, do other stuff when it suits you.

John
F.D. Taff

–

John
F.D. Taff has been writing for about 25 years now, with more than
eighty short stories and four novels in print. Six of his stories
have been awarded honorable mention in Ellen Datlow’s Year’s Best
Horror & Fantasy.

His
collection Little Deaths
was named the best horror fiction collection of 2012 by HorrorTalk.
His 2014 collection of novellas, The
End in All Beginnings, was
published by Grey Matter Press. Jack Ketchum called it “the best
novella collection I’ve read in years,” and it was a finalist for
a Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Fiction Collection.

Taff’s
work also appears in Single
Slices, Gutted:
Beautiful Horror Stories and
The Beauty of Death.

He
lives in the wilds of Illinois with a wife, a cat and three pugs.

About
Grey Matter Press

Grey
Matter Press is a Chicago-based publisher whose mission it is to
discover and cultivate the best voices working in dark fiction. The
company is committed to producing only the finest quality volumes of
exceptional fiction for its readers.Since the publication of their
first volume in late 2013, Grey Matter Press has released a
succession of bestselling titles, including two of which that have
been nominated for the prestigious Bram Stoker Award. FANGORIA
Magazine says of the publisher: "Grey Matter Press has managed
to establish itself as one of the premiere purveyors of horror
fiction currently in existence." For more information visit
GreyMatterPress.com or
follow the publisher on Twitter at @GreyMatterPress.

Like
to Feature?

If
you are a professional blogger or media outlet, please contact Erin
Al-Mehairi at hookofabook@hotmail.com
about a review copy or to schedule an interview or feature with any
of the authors.